Tag: Zayre’s

Take Me Home to Somewhere

Sunday morning and it’s sunny outside. It rained off and on for most of the day yesterday, with marvelous thunderstorms bracketing the day. The sky is clear and blue and the sun is out, so I suspect we’re done with the storms. I slept well–and late–this morning, and I’ve already decided to let the day take its own course. I have some dishes to put away and laundry to fold, and I also need to run a couple of errands this morning. I do feel rested this morning, which is a good thing. There are only three days left in 2024, and while I would ordinarily think good riddance to 2024, I don’t have very high hopes about how 2025 is going to go for any of us. Louisiana continues to circle the drain, as our governor seems determined to destroy the state and impoverish everyone (but there won’t be any of the woke nonsense down here, you betcha!), and we all know Republicans can’t govern for shit–already proven from 2017-2021–and they are already fighting a nasty civil war between their Techbros and the MAGA base currently, which gives us a pretty good idea of how the next four years are going to go. Yay.

I really didn’t do much of anything yesterday, really. I rewatched a classic LSU football game–Paul was out with some friends–and went down a bunch of rabbit holes on Youtube doing research. Researching the 1970s is trippy for me, and being reminded of things I’d long forgotten about–products, commercials, movies, books, etc.–inevitably brings a bunch of other memories back with them; buying Hardy Boys books at the Zayre’s, riding my bike to the 7/11 to get milk and a comic book, walking to the bus stop at St. Dominic’s (and walking home from there after school), and reading in bed on the weekends with a bag of either Taco-flavored Doritos or Bar-B-Q Fritos. Research is research, after all, and opening my mind to recollections of my past–which was a very long time ago–is kind of weird, since I spent so much of my life never looking back. I may try to do some writing today–stranger things have happened, after all–but I am not placing any demands on myself this weekend. I have Wednesday off for New Year’s, which is weird, and will probably wind up having the play-offs on all day while I do other things. I still haven’t finished reading my book, either, and I really need to get back to that this week, if not today. It ain’t going to finish reading itself, you know.

And I can’t get deeper into the TBR pile without actually, you know, reading the books.

Memories are tricky things, actually, and one of the most important tricks our (writers on a grander scale, and people in general) brains play on us is how it colors the way we remember things. We not only remember how things were said and who said them, but we also remember how we felt at the time–and those feelings also color how we remember things. I am sure all people, once they’ve reached a certain age, are stunned at how differently our parents remember things from our childhood, and how little we actually did understand when we were younger. It’s also possible for those memories, colored so strongly by protective emotions, to change and become more embedded in our brains with our coloring firmly in place. One of the reasons I never bothered to re-examine disputes or disagreements with people from the part is because I know my memories may not be exact and are definitely have been rewritten in my head to make me the innocent victim, or merely confirmed that I am a terrible person. The first few decades of my life were very chaotic; one of the things I’ve tried to work very hard on as an adult the last few decades was to remove chaos–or agents of chaos–from my life. If you’ve either hurt or deeply offended me, I don’t want to waste any more of my time on you. I don’t want to argue with you, I don’t want to explain why you were hurtful because I shouldn’t have to.

If I have to explain to you how you’ve been hurtful you really aren’t worth my time.

Part of the problem with writing about the past and going from your own memories and experiences is that tendency to make one’s self into a hero even when you have not been very heroic. I’ve kind of always considered myself cowardly for not coming out sooner, for not facing up to who I am, and not getting it all worked out in my head long before I actually did. Wanting to capture that sense of having a dark secret that you so desperately want to share, wishing the world was different yet knowing that it isn’t and probably never will be, looking ahead at the rest of your life as it yawns before you as endless misery and self-denial and self-loathing isn’t exactly inspiring, and capturing all of this on the page from the perspective of a twelve-year-old about to start high school is going to be hard without making him seem self-pitying and kind of pathetic. My own self-loathing about who I was as a child is also kind of self-defeating; I need to forgive myself at some point for not being a good little straight boy because that was never who I was supposed to be. If anything, I should loathe the middle-class cookie cutter suburban existence everyone tried to force me into–a square peg into a round hole, as it were. I suppose writing The Summer of Lost Boys will force me to face those feelings and work through them by writing about a character similar to me but not really me, if that makes sense? I know writing Bury Me in Shadows helped me come to terms with my family’s history–and Southern history in a broader context; #shedeservedit helped me come to terms with my own high school experience, and so maybe, this is the last step to letting go of a lot of things over which I had no control that I’ve punished myself for most of my adult life.

Chaos is never fun, really. I’ve also always felt bad for people who chose chaos rather than cutting it out of your life. I don’t want to waste any more of my life doing emotional labor for undeserving people who are determined to hold onto being miserable rather than letting things go and living more positively–who wants all that negativity in their life? Why would anyone choose that? And yes, I am sure I am vastly over-simplifying here–many people are trapped in horrible jobs and horrible life situations over which they have very little, if any, control over their lives.

There are several books I want to write about my suburb, in all honesty–just as there are any number of Alabama and New Orleans and Kansas books I want to write…which is never going to happen as long as I continue to not write.

And on that note, I am going to head into the spice mines and go run my errands. Not sure what I am going to do for the day other than that, but I like having a day with no plans to do much of anything, frankly. Have a great Sunday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again later or tomorrow before work! Thanks, as always, for stopping by this morning.

Season of the Witch

I read a lot of Norah Lofts when I lived in the suburbs of Chicago.

I originally found her through her historical fictional biographies of royal women, or royal-adjacent. I was in a Henry VIII phase–the whole six wives thing–and I saw a copy of her book about Anne Boleyn–The Concubine–on the wire racks at Zayre’s, so I bought it. It was very well done, and Lofts tried to get into the head of Anne and who she was, the reasons she basically changed Western civilization, and gave me an entirely new perspective on the infamous Anne. From there I went on to A Rose for Virtue (Napoleon’s stepdaughter/sister-in-law Hortense de Beauharnais, Queen of Holland), The King’s Pleasure (Katherine of Aragon), Crown of Aloes (Isabella of Castile), The Lost Queen (Caroline Matilda of Denmark), and Eleanor the Queen (Eleanor of Aquitaine)1. I also read, from there, some of her historical fiction, which I greatly enjoyed (Nethergate comes to mind). What I liked most about Lofts was she was not, in any way, a sentimental writer; her stories didn’t end happily all the time (especially her books about royal women; they all died miserable). I always wanted to read her Nativity novel, How Far to Bethlehem?, or her book Esther (obviously, the Bible’s Queen Esther). I remembered Lofts sometime within the last four or five years, and got a copy of her ghost story collection, which I enjoyed.

And then I remembered one whose plot I really couldn’t recollect–The Little Wax Doll, and got a second hand copy on-line.

It was like reading an entirely new novel, and I am glad I revisited it, believe you me.

The interview had been arranged to take place in London at half past three on a Saturday afternoon. This was a time so extremely convenient to Miss Mayfield that she was disposed to regard it as providential. It had saved her from the embarrassment of having to ask for time off to attend an interview in which she might not be successful, and from which she might be obliged to return to face her present Head’s resentment. In her diffident attempt to maintain secrecy she had left Alchester without the precaution of obtaining a testimonial. This she recognised as the action of a fool, but she had taught in the ugly Midland town for a bare two years, and she carried in her shabby handbag a coolly eulogistic report of her twenty years’ work in Africa, If that did not suffice, and if the interview showed any sign of leading to a new appointment, then would be time enough to approach Miss Stevens and break the news she was contemplating a move,

Canon Thorby had written, “Claridge’s Hotel would be convenient for me, since I have another appointment there earlier in the day. I shall be waiting for you and if you ask at the desk someone will will point me out to you.”

He wrote on thick smooth paper which justified the term “cream-laid.” His writing was small, elegant, meticulously legible. It called up an imaginry vision of the writer, plump, rubicund, with a fringe of silvery hair and tranquil blue eyes. Kindly, perhaps a trifle pompous.

As I said earlier, I didn’t really remember much of this story, other than the main character was an older schoolteacher moving to an idyllic village in East Anglia to teach at the village school, and the little rural village has some pretty dark secrets that she’s going to stumble into. Another thing I’d forgotten–although I should have remembered from reading her ghost story collection–was how compelling a writer she was. There are beautiful turns of phrase everywhere, as well as observations about life–particularly in a small village–that are really spot on, clever and insightful.

I also love that her heroine is a woman many people would overlook–particularly in the time in which this book was written (originally published in 1960)–a dowdy, plain spinster in either her late thirties or early forties. I wouldn’t have thought much about it when I first read the book, but the deep devotion of her attachment to a woman named Ruth, with whom she built a school and hospital in Kenya and worked there with her for forty years, and her determination to save enough money so she and Ruth can retire together and share a cottage blissfully for the rest of their lives?

In this read, this friendship just screamed lesbian to me.

Deborah Mayfield could easily have turned into a stereotype–the old maid schoolteacher–but Lofts isn’t interested in stereotypes; she created a character who is interesting by virtue of the journey she takes over the course of the story. She is a bit unsure of herself at the beginning of the book, always afraid of calling attention to herself and just keeps her opinions to herself. But as she falls in love with this interesting little village and blossoms with not only her students but the other villagers–she still sees herself as a nonentity, not really seeing herself as the others see her–she also, slowly but surely, finds herself being pulled into a strange situation which makes her, always questioning herself, question herself further. Surely, what she suspects cannot be? There can’t be people who believe in the dark arts and witchcraft in this town? But it’s really the only explanation, and as she gets pulled further and further into the odd circumstances regarding her student Ethel and her grandmother Granny Rigby–to the point where she is willing to give up her comfy little home and job to try to call out what’s going on in Walwyk–she begins to get a sense of her own power; the inability to stand by and do nothing while something untoward is going on strengthen her resolve and makes her stronger.

Then about halfway through the book there is a huge plot twist, which throws everything into a different, just as suspenseful and thrilling, direction–and one in which Deborah finally comes into her own, managing to get her way back to Walwyk in order to stop a horrible outcome that isn’t predestined.

One of the other things I like about the book is Lofts’ lack of sentimentality. The ending of the book makes it seem as though the day has been saved…but has it, after all? I also love that we never really know if there is actually witchcraft going on in the town–or maybe it just looks like it? Lofts leaves this up in the air as well–which she probably wouldn’t get away with today.

A terrific reread, and a terrific author I am very happy to rediscover.

  1. She also wrote The Lute Player, about Richard the Lionhearted, his wife Berengaria, and the minstrel Blondel–which was my first exposure to the idea that Richard, the great English hero, was queer. That revelation was a bit life changing, as I began looking for hints of homosexuality being covered up in history books. ↩︎

Broken Down in Tiny Pieces

I will spare you, Constant Reader, the trials and tribulations of my medical travails; I have to see another specialist, and we’ll leave it at that for now.

I also had to research whether either of these specialists he referred me to actually take my insurance (they do) and then get to hope they can see me at some point before this gets even worse and more difficult to take care of. I spent the rest of the day cleaning and trying to put this bullshit out of my head, because all it did was make me angry all over again and, unless I am putting that anger to productive use, it’s just wasted energy. But I’m glad I’m making progress on this at any rate, and I suspect that a doctor will be the murder victim in a book I will write at some point in the next few years. I also made an appointment on Sunday to get the hearing aids process moving along–it would be so great if I could get them before the trip, wouldn’t it?–and so at least soon I’ll be able to hear again, and in about a month I’ll be able to chew again. Yay!

Always look at the positive. Life doesn’t give you anything you can’t handle; it’s how you handle it that matters.

I took a shower to wash the blech of the day off me–it’s amazing to me how that always seems to work and put me into a better mood. The symbolism of washing the negativity off of me is actually effective and works to somehow reset my brain. I also had a great mail day–picking up the mail on the way home and made groceries, too–in which I got the ARC of the new Margot Douaihy Sister Holiday crime novel (her debut, Scorched Grace, is fantastic) and Duane Swierczynski’s short story collection Lush and Other Tales of Boozy Mayhem, which I am looking forward to digging into. Paul got home rather late last night, but we did have time to watch an episode of Turn of the Tide–but I think I actually have lost the thread of the plot. But it’s entertaining enough, still. I do want to start watching Ahsoka on Disney–I’ll try anything Star Wars; so far Boba Fett is the only Star Wars series we didn’t finish.

I’m still behind on talking about the Alfred Hitchcock Presents stories I’ve read lately; but yesterday at the specialist’s office I started reading Brett Halliday’s story “Pieces of Silver” from Stories to Be Read Late at Night, and it was an interesting tale, if dated, and more than a little bit guilty of racism. I’d not read Halliday before, but I’ve heard of him; I remember seeing his Mike Shayne novels on the wire racks at Zayre’s when I was a kid, and i have one of his books Hard Case Crime reprinted, but haven’t read yet. It’s a very typical tale of its time, though–complete with the colonialist mentality toward the indigenous people of Latin America. The story is set in Mexico, and is about an ugly American-type who has come to the region looking for oil. I will say the ugly American is the villain of the story and every step of the way Halliday is very quick to point out the classism, racism, and toxic masculinity of Thurston, the American–the way he treats the locals he hires to take him up river into the jungle; the way he ogles and wants the teenaged daughter of an American expatriate who married a local girl–but while there is absolutely no question that Thurston wound up getting exactly what he deserved…it’s very hard to be sympathetic to the author’s view of Mexico as a still wild, exotic and extremely primitive place; he certainly doesn’t view the Mexican working class with the same respect as Katherine Anne Porter. (On the other hand, I’ve always been bored by Porter’s Mexico stories–because even in them there’s still an element of the privileged white woman viewing the plight of the poor Mexican working class from her lofty perch at a safe distance.)

Reading this story only served to further emphasize to me how tricky this short story from the past that I am currently trying to revise and finish will be. Originally set in the Yucatan (I wrote it after I visited the Mayan ruins there), it was one of those Alfred Hitchcock Presents/ Tales from the Crypt kind of stories, but in reviewing the story as I wrote it, I fell into the trap Halliday did with his story–making the native people exotic and othered; mysterious and primitive. I am sure there are still poor people living in remote places in Mexico, but this isn’t the way to write about them. I’d been thinking of moving the setting of my story from Latin America (in this revision, I created a fictional country) to the Aegean–like there aren’t plenty of Greek myths to build the story around, make it seem real, and of course I can create a mysterious remote Greek island no one ever visits and no one would blink twice. I just haven’t been there myself, but I need to snap out of the mentality that I can only write about places I’ve been. It does help, of course, but…when you’re creating a fictional place, you’ve never been there. No one has.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Thursday, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again tomorrow.

(She’s a) Very Lovely Woman

Saturday morning and it looks kind of gray outside the windows this morning as I look out at the world blearily and drink my first cup of coffee. I slept very well last night–which is always welcome–but woke up feeling a bit groggy this morning. I am sure the caffeine will work–it generally does–but as I glance around at the chaos of my office/kitchen my inclination is to pour the coffee out and go back to bed and sleep the rest of the day away, hoping magical elves or something else will show up whilst I sleep to finish organizing and arranging this mess into something resembling workable order. On the other hand, I don’t think that’s going to happen, so I am going to need to wake up, buckle up, and put my nose to the proverbial grindstone. I’ve got to contain this mess–and do it properly, no more sweeping things under proverbial rugs to get mess out of sight–and I’ve got to work on the book today and I need to run some errands. I also have to go to the gym today, so I will most likely follow football championship games today by periodically looking on-line to check scores only. Paul is going into his office this afternoon to do some work as well, and I need to update my to-do list and…yes, it’s a very busy day for a Gregalicious.

I finished reading Murder Most Fowl by Donna Andrews last night–charming, as always, delightful and witty and funny–and decided, since I was talking about how much I preferred Miss Marple to Hercule Poirot the other day, that I should revisit one of the Marple stories. I have a hardcover copy of A Caribbean Mystery–I don’t recall where it came from–but it has some sentimental value for me in that it was the first Marple novel of Christie’s I had read all those many moons ago when I was a child, holing up in my room on Saturdays with a book and a bag of Bar-B-Q Fritos. (My first Poirot was actually Halloween Party, which I also have a hardcover copy of and again, do not recall where I got it or how long I have had it; I read most Christies in paperbacks purchased at the Bolingbrook Zayre’s off their wire paperback racks) In those first few pages of the book, it spelled out exactly what I loved about the Marple stories–about how living in a small village actually exposes one to almost every kind of human behavior there is in a smaller ecosystem, and the great irony that the smallness and rural aspects of the small community are all too frequently seen as provincial and inexperienced in the world (why Grace Metalious’ Peyton Place was so shocking when it was originally published some seventy years ago; that placid, idyllic on the surface looking village/small town/rural community has a lot more going on than one would think at first glance). This is an excellent set-up, really, for the story Christie is writing about this fictional resort on a fictional West Indies island; her nephew, the successful novelist Raymond West, has paid for this trip for her to get some sun and recover from an illness…and when she originally protested about the expense and “who will watch out for my home in St. Mary Mead”–this response (which I hadn’t remembered) hit me right between the eyes:

Raymond had dealt with everything. A friend who was writing a book wanted a quiet place in the country. “He’ll look after the house all right. He’s very house proud. He’s a queer. I mean–“

He had paused, slightly embarrassed–but surely even dear old Aunt Jane had must have heard of queers.

Now, what is one to make of that? It was a jolt, certainly. It put me in mind of something I came across on Twitter the other day, written by Wil Wheaton, in which he had answered at a con somewhere a question regarding the current debate of “can you separate the art from the artist?” This is something I’ve pondered about quite a bit–most recently, the feeling of guilt I experienced in rewatching Chinatown, knowing now what I–we all–know about Roman Polanski. I enjoyed Chinatown every time I’ve seen it, and I was now watching–rewatching–through a different lens than I had before; I was watching in terms of my own Cynical 70’s Film Festival, to see how a 70’s film that actually harkened back to old-style crime/hard-boiled/noir styles, but with a more modern (at the time) sensibility fit into that 70’s cynicism and darkness about humanity and human behavior. But the discomfort kept popping up, particularly because Polanski himself appears in the film…and I eventually decided not to rewatch another favorite, Rosemary’s Baby, because of it.

I am not going to consign Agatha Christie to the trash heap of history; she was an extraordinary writer, and one of the most influential in the field in which I myself write. Nor do I think a simple throwaway line or two in a book originally published in 1964 is enough to dismiss Christie and her canon as homophobic and never revisit her work. In fact, given the time period in which the book was written, I am surprised the two sentences weren’t, frankly, much worse. Reading the sentences didn’t offend or outrage me; it was just a surprise, primarily because I didn’t remember them at all in a book I’ve read multiple times over the years–and I think when this hardcover came into my possession (I won’t swear to it, but I think I got it during one of my many eBay buying frenzies after Hurricane Katrina, when I felt it necessary to get copies of books with some sentimental value to me) I did actually read it again because I didn’t remember the plot–and this either went right past me or I noticed and didn’t think much of it.

Revisiting this book and viewing it through a modern lens is going to be interesting. And like I said, the reference could easily have been worse–but seeing queer used in this way reminds me of how it used to be used. The younger generations are reclaiming the word, and I myself have been advocating for it as a generic term for the non-straight community for eons…but I also can see why there are people of my generation/the one before me/the one after me who object to its use and why.

But I would a thousand times rather see the word queer used in an Agatha Christie novel than faggot. And I also remember the sympathetic depiction of a lesbian couple in my favorite Marple, A Murder is Announced.

Interesting thoughts on a Saturday morning. The sun has come out now and it’s not quite so gray outside; the second cup of coffee is certainly hitting the spot right now and the grogginess is beginning to leave from not only my head but from my body. I still don’t want to straighten up this mess, but there’s no choice, really, and I want to get some good work on the book done today and tomorrow. I need to go to the gym either today or tomorrow as well; perhaps later this afternoon once I get some writing/cleaning/organizing completed. I cannot be completely lazy this weekend, much as I would like to be; I have to get things done, and the more things I get done now the fewer things I will have to do later this month (I am not, for example, going to want to write on Christmas). But once a procrastinator, always a procrastinator.

And now it occurs to me that perhaps I am procrastinating here, so I am going to bring this to a close. Have a lovely Saturday, Constant Reader, and will talk to you soon.

Young Offender

As I said yesterday, I had been wanting to reread Summer of ’42 for quite some time now, and finally decided to bite the bullet and start it yesterday.

He always intended to come back, to see the island again. But the oppertunity had never quite presented itself. This time, however, with a break in his schedule and with events moving remrkably in his favor, he had driven far up the New England coast to see if the magic still prevailed. Aboard the old ferry his Mercedes convertible earned the icy nonchalance of a half dozen craggy islanders, for very few new cars ever make that crossing. Cars that came to Packett Island are usually well into the varicose stage of their lives, and as such, they are by time and temperament unconcerned with a return trip to the mainland. “Cars come to this fuckin’ island to die.” Oscy had said that. Oscy, the big deal philosopher. And it was as true in 1970 as it had been in 1942.

He studied the faces around him, each turned to the wind, taking the breeze full face. It was apparent that none aboard remembered him. But then, he was barely fifteen that last time he forked over the twenty-five-cent fare. And in the intervening years nmuch had changed, including the twenty-five cents, which was now a dollar, and himself, which was now forty-two. How, then, could anyone remember him? The nerve.

The Mercedes moved with disinterest along what purported to be the Packett Island Coastway, for the speed limit was thirty, hardly a challenge for an exhumed LaSalle, let alone a hot Mercedes-Benz. To his left were the familiar dunes, sulking in the grass, incongruously scattered with the uncatalogued refuse and bleached timber that the sea could toss so casually across the road whenever it felt so disposed. And to his right, the sea itself, choppy and gray-green. And large. Very large indeed. One of the largest in the world.

I first read Summer of ’42 when I was either eleven or twelve; I don’t remember which; I just know that we had already moved out to the suburbs and I bought a copy off the wire racks where the Zayre’s stocked paperbacks, cover out and about four books deep. I’m not really sure why I picked it, of the scores of paperbacks from Dell and Fawcett Crest and Pocketbooks; there had to be a reason but nearly fifty years later I cannot remember. The movie was out at the time, and the cover art was from the movie, with Jennifer O’Neill standing in the sand looking out to see, and Gary Grimes seated in the sand behind her looking at her longingly; her little beach cottage was in the background along with the dunes and sea grasses. Was it because the cover depicted a beach scene, and we were beginning to spend our summer vacations including the Gulf Coast of the Florida panhandle in our annual jaunts to Alabama to visit family? The answer is lost in the mists of time, alas, but I did buy it, I did read it, and never really forgot it. It’s a lovely little book, nostalgic and sweet with a little tinge of sadness running through it; I think I also identified very strongly with Hermie, the main character (obviously, standing in for Herman Raucher; the book is supposedly semi-autobiographical). Hermie was a dreamer whose family didn’t really understand him, he had an older sister who is barely a presence at all in the book, and his fantasy life/world was just as strong as mine. He often went off into daydreams the same way I did, and he didn’t really fit with his friends, whom he enjoyed and was annoyed by in equal measure. At just fifteen, he is just starting to experience his own sexuality, and that summer of 1942 he becomes obsessed with a beautiful young woman who stays in a cottage just outside the small town on the beach. He sees her with her husband–also stunningly handsome, and they are so clearly in love, and begins to sort of watch them whenever he gets the chance. The husband goes off to the war, leaving her alone, and he contrives a way to meet her, offering to help her carry packages home when she is overburdened. He is also clumsy and awkward; saying and doing things that embarrass him, and they begin to develop a kind of weird and different little friendship. She just thinks he’s a sweet boy, but he is crazy about her, and she becomes his sexual fantasy; speeding along his awakening awareness of sex and sexuality.

The book is entirely from his point of view; so deep inside that we really don’t get to know any of the other characters in the book other than from his perspective and how he perceives them. There are parts that are actually quite funny–the scene where he buys condoms is hilarious–and the bittersweet feeling that she was his first love that he can never quite forget is the motor that drives the engine of the story forward. It’s melancholy, and Raucher was a really good writer; he captures that awkwardness of being insecure in your own skin at fifteen beautifully, and the entire tone of the book–that bittersweet melancholy for a lost love and a lost time and really, lost youth–is rendered exquisitely.

And yet…

He doesn’t know this woman at all, other than she’s quite beautiful and in their little exchanges, very kind to him, if a bit confused by his behavior. He doesn’t even know her name until the book is almost finished. (SPOILER) And when she does have sex with him in the end–after getting the shattering telegram that her beloved husband has been killed in the war and she’s been drinking, in the throes of a powerful grief–it never really made sense to me. Why would she do this? She’s in her early twenties and he’s fifteen. And despite her vulnerability in that moment, she’s the adult here…when I first read the book and saw the movie, that power differential wasn’t anything I noticed (as I said, I wrote my own story inspired by this one without a second thought about statutory rape and so forth), but now…it’s weird. And he of course has never forgotten the first woman he had sex with (they say you never forget the first) but it also doesn’t go into any of those directions, and why now has he decided to go back and see the place? There’s a lot left out, and I actually was thinking, as i read it this last time, how much I would have liked to have seen the story from her point of view.

It’s a short book and, as I said, the writing is well executed and it flows nicely. It made me start thinking about my own story and how I could possibly rewrite it now. I was able to read over the course of the afternoon (like I said, it was really short) and I did enjoy the reread…but this time it raised a lot more questions than it did to my much younger self.

But like Hermie, I also never forgot the story, so that’s something, right?

Age of Consent

I slept late this morning–I didn’t even, as I inevitably do, wake up at five and fall back asleep, instead sleeping until almost eight thirty and then taking another fifteen minutes or so to acclimate myself to the idea of getting up. It wasn’t easy, as my entire body was still relaxed and the bed so accommodating and comfortable, but there was simply no way I could stay in be any longer. I have, as always, too much to do and get one today and as lovely as the thought of staying in bed for another couple of hours may have been, it was simply not to be. But the sleep felt marvelous; I don’t think I’ve slept so deeply in quite some time, to be honest, and while you may not be as fascinated as I am by my sleeping, I did feel it necessary to comment on such a good night’s sleep for a change.

I was talking to a friend recently about Lolita–I can’t remember how or why the subject even came up in the first place–butthat conversation put me in mind about how we as a society have changed when it comes to the sexualization of teenagers by adults. I recently watched a terrible show called A Teacher, about a woman in her twenties who teaches high school and ends up having an affair with one of her students, and how this basically ruins their lives on both sides. There has been a lot of that in Louisiana over the past decade–there were two teachers in Destrehan having affairs with male students, occasionally have three-ways with them a while back–and it seems like these kinds of scandals break down here all the time. Teenaged boys and older women have long been looked at societally as not the same thing as the reverse–inevitably triggering responses from adult men things like I wish I’d had some older woman to teach me a few things and so forth, that whole “boys will be boys” mentality that still pervades the culture and society to some degree. This is something I may write about at some point, because it interests and intrigues me–even if it is a bit of a third rail, a dangerous path to follow with lots of potential pitfalls along the way. Teenagers often confuse hormonal responses as love–the whole conflation of sex and love that usually most grow out of it at some point–and of course, teenage boys are easy to manipulate because of their hormones. I think the primary problem I had with A Teacher was I never understood the woman’s motivations; it never made sense to me that she would be so self-destructive; they tried tacking on some back story after the affair was exposed which involved a difficult relationship with her own father, but it didn’t work for me. I also think back to all of the “coming of age” fiction I read when I was a kid, and how inevitably such romances/relationships were always seen as positive things, or depicted that way; there was always some inexperienced teenaged boy falling for some beautiful older woman who inevitably will take his virginity–going back as far as Tea and Sympathy, where the woman did it to “cure” the boy of suspected homosexuality, through Summer of ’42 (I also read the book of this, which impacted me with its tale of loss and longing, and how thirty years after that summer the now adult man still remembers her with love and longing; it would not be depicted that way now) to Class, which really does not hold up well AT ALL. There was a few of these in the early 1980’s–I remember another one called My Tutor, where a wealthy man hires a beautiful woman to tutor his son, they have sex eventually and then the boy (played by Olivia Newton-John’s then husband, Matt Lattanzi, who was stunningly beautiful) finds out his father not only hired her to tutor him but to seduce him (“make a man out of him” is how it was put, how it was always put)–but for a very long time adult/teenager relationships like this were seen as no big deal, at least in films; but I also think it’s pretty safe to say that this was also true societally as well; a father would tend to be proud of his teenaged son for fucking a teacher, rather than being horrified and pressing charges….I think A Teacher missed a beat there, frankly; by having the main male character being raised by a single mom instead of a single dad or at least both parents (or one being even a step-parent) they miss the chance to really address this aspect of toxic masculinity; naturally a mother would think of her child as being molested, whereas a father….that would have been interesting.

It is something I am considering for a Scotty story; it’s all amorphous up there in my brain right now, but it’s slowly forming.

And of course, if the teenaged son was having an affair with an adult male, the father’s reaction would be vastly different than if the affair was with an adult woman.

Yesterday I watched the film version of Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger, which wasn’t nearly as good as it could have been. The film came across as very cold, and also got off to a very slow start. It was enjoyable for the acting, which was top notch–and one can never go wrong casting Charlotte Rampling–and it was a beautifully done film; a very quiet British style ghost story (I really have been enjoying British ghost stories over the past few years, and now I want to read The Little Stranger, of which I have a copy somewhere), and the film has a very dream-like sense to it that is rather marvelous…but that same sensibility also keeps the viewer at a slight distance, which results in the viewer not getting emotionally invested in the characters or the story. (At least, that’s my takeaway from it.) It also put me in mind of Sarah Waters, who is an enormously talented, award-winning British lesbian writer. I reviewed her first novel, Tipping the Velvet, years ago when I still a reviewer, and was blown away by it completely. At some point since then I stopped reading her–not sure why, and I don’t think it was a conscious choice, to be completely honest; I think she somehow just fell off my radar–but watching this film reminded me of what great writer she is, and perhaps I should go back and read her entire canon, including rereads of the first couple of books–I believe her second novel was Affinity–but…as always, time stands in my way.

I also was thinking of revisiting some Agatha Christie; Catriona McPherson posted on Facebook the other day about a talk she is giving for a public library (I believe in South Carolina?) about Nancy Drew and Agatha Christie, which put me in mind of Christie again–sending me own a rabbit hole of memories of her novels–in particular my personal favorite of hers, Endless Night–and how I came to read Agatha Christie in the first place. (I picked up a copy of Witness for the Prosecution off the wire paperback racks at Zayre’s; I knew it had been a movie and I knew who Christie was, but had never read her and was beginning to transition from kids’ mysteries to adults. I also didn’t catch the smaller font words beneath the title reading and other stories; I thought it was a novel and was most startled to discover it wasn’t. So the first adult mysteries I read were Christie short stories, which blew me away. The first actual Christie novel I read was The Clocks–after which I was hooked. Remembering this made me also remember the great mass market paperback publishers of the day: Dell, Pocket Books, and Fawcett Crest. Almost every paperback I read as a teenager was from one of them, and I do remember those publishers very fondly.) I have some Christies here in the Lost Apartment,–I was thinking of rereading either A Caribbean Mystery or Nemesis. I always, for some reason, preferred Miss Marple to Poirot; still do, to this very day. I read the first few paragraphs of Nemesis last night, and was, as always, entranced. So perhaps for this weekend I shall reread Nemesis and some short stories, around working on the book.

Because I absolutely, positively, must work on the book.

And on that note tis back to the spice mines with me. Have a lovely Saturday, Constant Reader, and don’t forget there are panel discussions for Saints and Sinners up on the Tennessee Williams Festival’s Youtube channel.

The Moment I Knew


Thursday, y’all, and I think I am going to take a vacation day tomorrow to try and help me get caught up on all the things I need to get caught up on. Another three day weekend, following up on the one just past already? To be fair, it kind of needs to actually happen, to be honest. I also have to remember to dedicate myself to making sure all the things I need to get done actually get done.

Which, you know, is the real trick here.

I also kind of need to pull myself together. While I am fully aware that there are certain things about myself I cannot control–depression, the mood swings, etc–it is still enormously frustrating to have to deal with them, try to work through them, get through them while trying to keep going with everything I am juggling these days. Part of it comes, undoubtedly, from my inability to ever get a handle on everything; even when I am making lists and working from them there’s always something I am forgetting when I make the list or something that comes up new after I make the list–and the list is so long and daunting to begin with that the thought of adding something else to it is paralyzing, which drags me back into the endless cycle of plate spinning to “Flight of the Bumblebee” again.

Obviously, the insomnia never helps either, nor does fearing, every night when I go to bed, that I am going to have insomnia again.

We started watching Mythic Quest last night on Apple Plus, and it’s not bad; we watched two episodes and I think it has the potential to become really funny; it stars Rob McIlhenny of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and I was really surprised to discover that not only was he the driving force behind that show, but this one as well. We’re also watching We Hunt Together on Showtime–we started the other night, before getting distracted by Ted Lasso, which I absolutely love–and while it’s not bad, it’s not the best British crime show I’ve watched. It’s very unusual in that it features two mixed couples (a Black man and a white woman) on opposing sides of the law–the investigating detectives and the criminal couple killing people–and reflects the similarities of relationships and their dynamics in both; it’s like they are mirror images of each other if it’s a funhouse mirror. It’s an interesting choice, and the acting is superb; the female cop is played by Eve Myles of Torchwood fame, whose work I always enjoy.

During my condom-packing hours yesterday I also returned to the Cynical 70’s Film Festival, this time watching Jane Fonda in her Oscar-winning role as Bree Daniels, the call girl, in Klute (what is with women winning Oscars playing prostitutes, anyway?). Klute is a very strange film, and it’s the first of what is called, by film scholars, the Paranoia Trilogy of director Alan J. Pakula (I have recently watched the other two, The Parallax View and All the President’s Men). Klute, to me, is a deeply flawed film, but an interesting one all the same. It’s a crime movie, the title character is a cop who takes a leave of absence to investigate the disappearance of a friend, and yet neither the cop nor the investigation are the lead story of the movie; it’s really a character study of Bree Daniels. Klute, the detective, is played almost completely emotionlessly by Donald Sutherland (obviously a choice made by both director and actor; since this is also the same period that produced his stunning performance in Don’t Look Now), so the emotional heart and center of the movie is Fonda’s performance. I came away from the film not entirely convinced by that performance; there was complexity there and some moments of truly fine acting, but over all–the film hasn’t really aged all that well (the underground world of orgies and call girls and pimps and heroin of Manhattan in the 1970’s it is trying to depict feels very screenwriter-ish to me; a film studio’s thoughts about how that particular subculture would look, walk and talk)–but I can see why she won an Oscar; those scenes where she is able to really inhabit the character are stellar. Klute is a subversion of noir/crime thrillers, really; by focusing on the character study of Bree rather than the story, it becomes less a crime story than the story of the unfortunate aspiring actress/model who turns to tricking to pay the bills and then is trying to leave the life but isn’t entirely able to; not only because she needs the money but because she likes the power of being in control–or at least, the allusion of control hooking brings her.

Imagine Double Indemnity if the focus of the film wasn’t the plan to kill Phyllis’ husband, but rather who she is and why she is the way she is.

The paranoia is also there in that Bree’s phone is tapped, not only by Klute but also by the killer. There’s another part of the film that is a flaw; the motive for the killing and the motive for hiring and paying Klute doesn’t really wash; but’s that probably also the crime writer/editor in me. I had also thought the film was based on a book but was apparently wrong; I could have sworn I remember seeing a paperback novel of Klute on the wire racks at Zayre’s, but of course it could have simply been a novelization of the film.

I did find Don’t Look Now also available to stream somewhere as I idly looked through all my streaming services apps last evening before we started watching Mythic Quest; I definitely want to watch that film again–and it’s not a bad idea for me to delve back into Daphne du Maurier’s short stories again. I may even have to read one of the novels she wrote that I haven’t read yet; there appears to be an adaptation of The Scapegoat (which I’ve not read) available to stream as well. The concept of the book intrigues me–the concept of the look-alike, which is something I’ve always wanted to write about myself. I’ve always had this idea of a bartender in a gay bar being approached by someone who thought he was someone else as a great starting place for a thriller; the problem, of course, being that now DNA would take away any possibility of an imposter passing for someone else. (FUCKING technological improvements.)

This idea came to me–not the least because of The Ivy Tree by Mary Stewart–but because when I used to visit New Orleans before moving here, consistently people–locals–would come up to me and start talking to me like I was someone else; eventually I would point out to them that they didn’t actually know ME and they would be very startled. This continued for a year or so after we moved here–I would sometimes get bought drinks by total strangers who thought I was someone else, and now that I think about it, perhaps the reason so many bartenders gave me a drink for free now and then was because they thought I was someone else. But it stopped after living here for a few years–I’d forgotten this used to happen–but they would always tell me I had a double here in New Orleans; one that I never met or saw anywhere. Isn’t that strange? But I always thought it was a good opening or idea for a story–but of course now, as I mentioned before, DNA has ruined the imposter stories forever.

Today is a better day, so here’s hoping it lasts and I can get back on track.

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Phyllis A. Whitney is one of my all-time favorite authors.

I first discovered her, as Constant Reader is probably already aware, when I was a kid looking for mysteries in the school library. I distinctly remember that day in the fourth grade when I found The Mystery of the Hidden Hand on the shelves at the Eli Whitney Elementary School library; this was during my period of fascination with the ancient world (I was getting the Time-Life series Great Ages of Man; and had just gotten the volume Classical Greece). The description on the back of the book told me it was set in Greece, and had to do with antiquities and Greek history; that was all I needed and I signed it out. (I have, in the past, mistakenly identified The Secret of the Tiger’s Eye as my gateway drug into Whitney’s novels; I remembered incorrectly.) I enjoyed the book tremendously; I returned it and checked out The Secret of the Tiger’s Eye. I went on to read many of her children’s mysteries; she won two Edgars for Best Juvenile and was nominated twice more. After we’d moved to the suburbs, Signet started reissuing her children’s mysteries, and I started buying them at Zayre’s: The Mystery of the Angry Idol, The Secret of the Spotted Shell, The Mystery of the Black Diamonds, The Mystery of the Golden Horn, The Mystery of the Gulls, and numerous others. (I started collecting them again as an adult, thanks to eBay.)

I won’t tell the story again of how I rediscovered Whitney as a romantic suspense writer for adults; I’ve told that story any number of times, and I read almost everything she wrote for adults–but with The Ebony Swan I noted a decline in the quality of her writing, and never read anything she published after that. (I do intend, at some point, to read the ones I’ve never read–it’s the completist in me.)

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Cunningham’s department store is quiet again now. Sylvester Haring still puts his head in the door of my office whenever he goes by, to call out “Hi, Linell!” and perhaps to linger and study the pictures on my walls, to speak briefly of the past. But his days are given over to the humdrum of catching shoplifters and petty thieves, instead of trailing a murderer.

He never mentions that one picture we hunted down together, or the tragic denouement to which it led. But now and then we cock an eyebrow at each other because we are conspirators and know it.

Not that the law was in any way defeated. Payment in full was made for all those terrible things that happened. But still, Haring and I know what we know and the case as it broke in the papers told only half the story.

There are still things about Cunningham’s that make me shiver. I can never cross that narrow passageway that leads past the freight elevators into the display department without a feeling of uneasiness. I cannot bear the mannequin room at all, and I will go to any length to avoid setting foot in it. But most of all I am haunted by the symbols that came into being during the case.

The color red, for instance. I never wear it anymore, because it was the theme of those dreadful days. It ran beneath the surface of our lives like a bright network of veins, spilling out into the open now and then to accent with horror. And there are the owls. Sometimes in my dreams that eerie moment returns when I stood there in the gloom with all those plaster creatures crowding about me, cutting off my escape.

Nor will I ever again breathe the scent of pine without remembering the way the light went out and those groping hands came toward me. Strange to have your life saved by the odor of Christmas trees.

But the worst thing of all is when I imagine I hear the strains of Sondo’s phonograph. For me, those rooms will never be free of ghostly music and I break into cold chills in broad daylight whenever a radio plays Begin the Beguine.

And while there are some romantic aspects to The Red Carnelian, it’s probably one of the least romantic suspense-like novels she published (Skye Cameron, The Quicksilver Pool, and The Trembling Hills were not mysteries, at least not that I recall; but they were also early in her career and once she hit her stride, she became enormously successful). It’s a straight-up murder mystery, told in the first person point of view of Linell Wynn, who works at Cunningham’s Department Store on State Street in Chicago, writing copy for advertising posters, ads, and so forth. When the story opens, the entire store is on edge, because the window display manager, Michael “Monty” Montgomery, is returning to work that day from his surprise honeymoon; he and Linell had been a thing before his sudden elopement caught everyone by surprise. He’d married Chris Gardner, whose father Owen ran the luxury floor–the 4th–evening gowns and jewelry and furs. Linell claims that she and Monty were cooling things off when he suddenly eloped; I’m not entirely convinced that’s not something she claims to salvage her damaged pride. Naturally, later that day Monty is murdered, and of course, Linell finds the body; a fact which she, on the advice of Bill Thorne (one of the store’s vendors) keeps quiet from the police. He was killed near one of the window displays, by a golf club; Linell found the broken end of it in the window before she finds the body and put it back in the golf bag, thus handling the murder weapon. She also finds a piece of stone, a red carnelian, in the window display and puts it in her smock pocket and forgets about it.

Linell, of course, immediately becomes suspect number one–but it doesn’t take long for her, her store detective buddy Sylvester Haring, and new love interest Bill (who she does suspect from time to time) to find out almost every single person working in the store who’s a character in the book has a reason for hating Monty and wanting to see him dead. Linell of course also finds herself targeted from time to time by the killer–who never actually kills her (obviously)–as she sort of starts figuring out the who’s and what’s and why’s of the story.

It’s quite a good read; the characters are very well fleshed out, and the writing itself is pretty good. Whitney always wrote in a more Gothic style, in her books for adults; a style that seems a little dated now as well but still manages to hold your interest. I also would imagine a teenager reading the book today would have to look up what a “phonograph” was–although its usage makes it fairly clear to me what it is; but of course I grew up with phonographs and vinyl records and needles and all the accoutrement that goes along with them.

I’d recommend it as a gateway to Whitney’s other, more romantic suspense type work; it works very well as a stand-alone cozy type mystery novel.

It’s Alright

Monday morning, and we have thus far made it through another weekend, and have another week to stare down. I’ve not heard or seen any reports about how the gradual reopening of New Orleans went this weekend–I stayed my ass at home; I didn’t go outside at all other than to take out the trash–and today’s a work-at-home day. The gym has reopened, and I am debating whether I should go workout after work tonight. I’ve been itching to get back to the gym since everything closed–if you will recall, I’d started working out again before the shutdown, even managing to make it through Carnival, and had developed a really good routine before the world closed down on me.

I got some writing done on the Secret Project yesterday, almost two thousand words, which was pretty thrilling for me. I’d hoped to get more done–as I always do–but I really had to force those words out, and I was pretty glad to have been that productive when the words weren’t coming, so I called it a day when the well went dry and retired to my easy chair. I watched a great documentary on Galaxy Quest (one of my favorite movies) on Prime called Never Surrender–if you’re a fan of the movie, I highly recommend the documentary. Last evening Paul and I continued watching The Great, which is becoming more and more fun as I no longer think of them as actual historical figures, since the show bears so little resemblance to the actual history.

I also tried reading  a classic novel by a master of our genre, but couldn’t get very far into it. I admire what the author was doing with his style, voice and use of language–I’ve heard him speak and he’s all about the rhythm of the words, which is very important, and something I tell beginning writers all the time to watch for, and why it’s always important to read your work out loud to make sure the rhythm you’re using is consistent–but he also was guilty of one of my pet peeves: the use of colons and semi-colons in fiction prose. Anyway, between that and the toxic masculinity and racism–I don’t care if it was accurate for the period, it’s hard for me to see toxic racist men as heroic–and when I got to the extensive use of the n*word–again, probably accurate and correct for the period–I was done. I put it in the donation pile and was done with it. I’ve read his work before and I don’t remember it being quite as bad as this particular book; but I intend to reread that book again at some point (it was also homophobic, which jumped off the page at me, and that’s why I want to reread it–to see if it still rings that way) and then I can gladly call it quits on that author.

I’m also still rereading Phyllis A. Whitney’s The Red Carnelian, which is more of a straight-up mystery than any of her other novels for adults. As I mentioned before, it was originally titled Red is for Murder; most of her novels for adults had a color in the title somehow–The Turquoise Mask, Silverhill, Hunter’s Green, Black Amber, Sea Jade–but when her work became more romantic suspense, it was reissued and retitled as The Red Carnelian, to fit her other titles more. Set in a sprawling department store on State Street in Chicago (like Marshall Field’s or Carson Pirie Scott, back in the day–I wonder which store she used as a research; Mrs. Whitney was a librarian, and always exhaustively researched her novels) named Cunningham’s, the book also offers an interesting, behind-the-scenes look at how department stores are run, and the various jobs (window dresser, poster and sign copy, marketing and sales, backdrop painting, mannequin arranging) that are necessary for the day-to-day operation of a large department store. Thinking about which store she used to research her novel sent me into an Internet wormhole, where I looked up Marshall Field’s, Carson Pirie Scott, Goldblatt’s, and Zayre’s, among the many department stores I remember visiting as a child in Chicago. (The bargain basement at Zayre’s was where I first discovered the children’s mystery series featuring Rick Brant, Ken Holt, and Biff Brewster.)

I kind of miss department stores.

I am hoping to get a lot accomplished this week–and I am really looking forward to our three day weekend that’s coming up. Huzzah!

Have a lovely day, Constant Reader.

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